Marines Axe Bomb-Shopping Plan After Danger Room Post

Share

Marines Axe Bomb-Shopping Plan After Danger Room Post

Remember the Marines' buy-bomb-parts-on-the-Internet research proposal? Well, forget it. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory canceled the effort, after word of it leaked to Danger Room.

The "Commercial Hunter" project was supposed to help the Corps understand what kind of arsenal could be ordered online, by giving university researchers 40 hour to conduct an ersatz shopping spree. The program was unclassified. But the Warfighting Lab didn't want the general public to find out about it, apparently.

"Please advise me on who provided the info on Commercial Hunter RFQ. My understanding is that the info was targeted specifically to colleges and universities. Also, who in the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory is the source that provided you this data. I ask because all interviews and info requests are to go through me and then vetted through command leadership prior to release," Lab spokesman Victor Lopez e-mailed Danger Room on Wednesday.

Obviously, I turned down that request. So we got another e-mail this morning, from Teri Snyder, a contracting officer at the Warfighting Lab.

"Please be advised that due to the release of information not cleared by the Contracting Officer, the RFQ that you published on your blog has been cancelled," she wrote. "If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me."

So I did.

"Just curious: Why was the release of information so damaging to the project? What about having Commercial Hunter public made it difficult to conduct?" I asked.